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But how do we explain likings and aversions? Sorrow, too, and
anger and pleasure, desire and fear- are these not changes,
affectings, present and stirring within the Soul?
This question cannot be ignored. To deny that changes take place
and are intensely felt is in sharp contradiction to obvious
facts. But, while we recognize this, we must make very sure what
it is that changes. To represent the Soul or Mind as being the
seat of these emotions is not far removed from making it blush or
turn pale; it is to forget that while the Soul or Mind is the
means, the effect takes place in the distinct organism, the
animated body.
At the idea of disgrace, the shame is in the Soul; but the body
is occupied by the Soul- not to trouble about words- is, at any
rate, close to it and very different from soulless matter; and
so, is affected in the blood, mobile in its nature. Fear begins
in the mind; the pallor is simply the withdrawal of the blood
inwards. So in pleasure, the elation is mental, but makes itself
felt in the body; the purely mental phase has not reached the
point of sensation: the same is true of pain. So desire is
ignored in the Soul where the impulse takes its rise; what comes
outward thence, the Sensibility knows.
When we speak of the Soul or Mind being moved- as in desire,
reasoning, judging- we do not mean that it is driven into its
act; these movements are its own acts.
In the same way when we call Life a movement we have no idea of a
changing substance; the naturally appropriate act of each member
of the living thing makes up the Life, which is, therefore, not a
shifting thing.
To bring the matter to the point: put it that life, tendency, are
no changements; that memories are not forms stamped upon the
mind, that notions are not of the nature of impressions on
sealing-wax; we thence draw the general conclusion that in all
such states and movements the Soul, or Mind, is unchanged in
substance and in essence, that virtue and vice are not something
imported into the Soul- as heat and cold, blackness or whiteness
are importations into body- but that, in all this relation,
matter and spirit are exactly and comprehensively contraries.
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